The conventional wisdom in the film industry is that sports movies are a poor investment because they don't attract women. Not even when they're about women. The marvellous George Cukor comedy Pat and Mike, starring Katharine Hepburn as an all-round sports star and Spencer Tracy as her manager, failed at the box-office; Dawn!, a biopic of the swimming champion Dawn Fraser, was scarcely shown outside Australia; Robert Towne's film about female athletes, Personal Best, was a major disaster. Bill Forsyth had a minor success with Gregory's Girl but the central character is a man and he's a hopeless footballer. This brings us to Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham, the heroine of which is a soccer-mad Indian girl from west London and (unless there's some innuendo that eludes me) refers to David Beckham's brilliance at getting a ball into the net around a wall of defenders.

Chadha, whose previous films are Bhaji on the Beach and What's Cooking?, makes feel-good comedies of ethnic manners. Difficult questions of race relations and the accommodation of tradition to social change are swept under the carpets on which the casts dance. While recognisably her work, Bend It Like Beckham is coarser and more ambitious than the earlier films. Her delightful protagonist, Jess Bhamra (Parminder Nagra), is a bright 18-year-old schoolgirl, daughter of Sikhs from East Africa. Dad works at Heathrow and they live comfortably in a semi-d under the flight path in Hounslow, trying to hold on to old ways. The anglicised Jess fantasises about playing alongside Beckham for Manchester United and having her performance appraised on TV by Gary Lineker, Alan Hansen and John Barnes. Of course her parents think soccer is dangerously unfeminine and when, through a lower-middle-class English chum, Jules (Keira Knightley), she gets a trial with the all-girl Hounslow Harriers she has to keep it a secret.

From this point on every cliché of the sports drama and of the family comedy flow freely and the film might well have been called 'Arundhati Roy of the Rovers'. Jess would have impressed Houdini with her skill in fooling her gullible parents so she can get out of the house to play with her team. When depressed she loses her form, but regains it the moment results matter. Every game ends with a cliffhanging shot at goal. Naturally the all-important match that will be watched by a scout for an American university coincides with her sister's wedding. On at least four occasions Jess is seen in an innocent embrace which the observer misinterprets (in one case she's taken to be a lesbian). In the final scenes liberal ecumenicism runs riot as everyone comes to appreciate everyone else's religion and tastes. Jess abandons the prospect of a legal career in Britain and heads off with a football scholarship to California, where Chadha herself now lives.

There are plenty of chuckles and smart lines in this relentlessly cheerful movie. One thinks especially of a remark by the primly conventional mother (Juliet Stevenson) of Jess's best friend, deploring her passion for soccer: 'There's a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one without a feller.' The games themselves are impressively edited. But the script by Chadha and her American husband, Paul Mayeda Berges (who also worked as second unit director), takes every easy way out and never recognises the possibility of real pain, the way the tougher, far funnier East Is East does.

Iain Softley's K-Pax is a horse of the same choler as Peter Shaffer's portentous Equus, a dim drama about a disturbed psychiatrist being healed by a patient's beautiful mind. In this case Kevin Spacey plays a vagrant arrested in New York, who claims to be a friendly alien from the planet K-Pax, called Prot. (That would go down well in South Armagh.) Incarcerated in the Psychiatric Institute of Manhattan he rapidly convinces the unhappy Dr Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges) that he has a special vision. His knowledge of astrophysics astonishes a Nobel laureate, and before you can say 'Cuckoo's Nest' his fellow patients are eager to accompany Prot back to K-Pax.

Smug, patronising stuff, this soggy affair culminates in a rational explanation that is as inadequate as it is unconvincing, and a payoff of dreadful sentimentality. Kevin Spacey is unsurpassed at playing unsympathetic characters, as he demonstrated in Glengarry Glen Ross, The Usual Suspects, Seven and Swimming with Sharks. Unfortunately his stage triumph as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh has evidently convinced him he should be playing the catalytic lead in dramas of social transformation and spiritual uplift. This explains his appearances in the dire trilogy of Pay It Forward, The Shipping News and K-Pax.

In one of the most recent Belgian films to be shown here, Jaco Van Dormael's The Eighth Day, a washed-out businessman was given a new lease of life through the company of a Down's syndrome man. Similarly in Lieven Debrauwer's Pauline and Paulette, the most popular Belgian picture of the past year, a mentally retarded woman in late middle age shows up the hollowness of cultural life in Brussels and the hypocrisy of a small provincial town. One of the country's leading actresses, Dora van der Groen, is overwhelmingly convincing as the eponymous Paulette. Tom Cruise to her Dustin Hoffman, Ann Petersen is also good as the exasperated sister who is forced to care for her when an older sister dies and a younger one shirks her responsibilities. The social detail of a slightly sad country obsessed with flowers and meat is rather good. The use of Tchaikovsky ballet music and Strauss waltzes on the soundtrack is excessive.

In James Wong's preposterous sci-fi kung-phooey action film, The One, interstellar cop Delroy Lindo pursues Chinese martial arts star Jet Li from one planet to another in a multiverse containing an infinite number of parallel galaxies. Li is apparently murdering different versions of himself (123 of them so far) to absorb their strength and become the invincible figure known as 'The One'. Watching him constantly being dissolved and beamed up to another planet to kill yet another doppelgänger gives new meaning to the song lyric 'Jet Li down the stream'.

Even more ludicrous is the straight-faced British movie Revelation, the fag end of a millennial cycle of apocalyptic pictures. Here a billionaire tycoon (Terence Stamp), and his cryptanalyst son (James D'Arcy) seek to prevent an occult conspiracy involving the Vatican, the CIA, the Masons and the Knights Templar finding the nails from Christ's cross and using the DNA to create a new Messiah combining Jesus and the anti-Christ. Viewing this farrago it's impossible to disentangle the Pentagon from the pentagram, to sort out the Wheatley from the chaff. In the uproarious climax the hero and heroine visit St John the Divine's shrine on Patmos, creep into the crypt, de-encrypt the crap and are about to creep out when they're trapped by a Vatican agent.